Originally posted by voodoochile I can't find the thread, but someone posted a stat that the are playing something like .333 ball when they don't hit at least 2 homeruns this year. So one homerun isn't enough according to that.

The flip side is that when they hit at least 2 they are 8 games over .500 or something...

Originally posted by voodoochile I can't find the thread, but someone posted a stat that the are playing something like .333 ball when they don't hit at least 2 homeruns this year. So one homerun isn't enough according to that.

The flip side is that when they hit at least 2 they are 8 games over .500 or something...

This is disturbing. The other day, I spent some time looking through Retro Sheet, a site that contains boxscores and information from past seasons. I looked at each Sox from the 1991, '92, and '93 seasons.

The Sox won several games in each of those seasons even when the bats didn't show up. Those teams knew how to execute in close ballgames, and they knew how to do the little things to score runs. The current White Sox team doesn't know to do these things.

Something needs to be done about the hitters' mindsets when they are at the plate. For whatever reason, everybody seems to think that he must hit the ball five hundred feet in order to score a run. The irony of the situation is, if everyone just focused on making solid contact and hitting the ball hard, the homeruns would be much more frequent. This is yet another area where the Sox are lacking. Every single hitter on this team is guilty of swinging for the fences.

The way I see, the following people are the most guilty of this offense:

Each of these players has shown a tendency to swing for the fences at one time or another this season. Maggs hasn't been doing it recently, and he has been swinging the bat well as a result.

Frank sometimes gets ahead of himself and tries to crush the ball when he should really just be thinking about hitting it hard back up the middle. This is what happens when we see him pop the ball up or hit a weak grounder to the third baseman. He has taken some bad swings recently. This may the result of him playing at DH instead of 1B, or it may be due to him "collapsing his backside," as Hawk often says.

When he is on, Joe Crede takes some of the nicest swings I've ever seen. When he is struggling, Crede takes some of the ugliest swings I've ever seen. Why this happens, I don't know, but several others have pointed it out.

Olivo hasn't been right at the plate since the day he hit the grandslam at the Urinal. It has become extremely easy to get him out. Just throw the high fastball, and he'll swing right through it.

Carlos Lee hits homeruns in bunches. When this happens, I think he begins to believe that he's a better hitter than he actually is, and he tries to pull everything, instead of just trying to go rightfield. Manuel has him hitting in the number two spot, where he is double-play waiting to happen.